The young man sitting in the airport in Baden-Baden was wearing his baseball cap with the peak towards the front, but before getting up to go across and get a bottle of water he turned it round to set the peak behind. On returning to his seat he reset the baseball cap peak to the front. A few minutes later when he got up to join the queue to get onto the plane to Stansted he turned the peak back round to face behind.
Here is my theory. The front-facing baseball cap is for interiority, focus, dialogue with intimates, the bubble of social media. The back-facing baseball cap is for interface with the public. It denotes disdain and nonchalance. It rejects intensity and engagement. That is because we reserve our best for the private and the distant interlocutor and our worst for the public, the sweaty alien.
In my investigations into the semiology of the baseball cap (a reader-friendly book along with gift cap will come out just in time for Christmas) I thought I could discount the side-worn baseball cap, surely now obsolete or at least only sported by the pre-teen. And then today I saw a side-wearer: a man in his forties with big stomach and in his long shorts stocky hocks. My semiotics abandon me! I am at a loss! Stop the press on that stocking filler.
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I was at an airport the other day. The airport was Stansted. I don’t like airports. It seems to me that airports display those aspects of society best designed to most exacerbate me. When you get through security they sit you in the centre of a carrousel of all the outlets you might spend your life trying to avoid, a ampitheatre of crap shops. Modern Man, including Modern Child, needs his accessories. He needs for his lightweight hand luggage to be on wheels, which extends his length three or fourfold, like some prehistoric reptile with an enormous tail. If he does not have wheeled luggage he has a back pack liable at any moment to clatter you on the side of the head. Modern Man is also bulkier than he once was. Modern child is bulkier too. Modern child can get very bulky. And both need more stuff. Phones; laptops; tablets; various forms of listening device; big headphones. Without them he is unable to function. In fact, with the headphones on the ears and the eyes on the smartphone Modern Man is mostly working in a state of sensory deprivation and with the reduced mobility of some lower life form. God only knows the mincemeat Primitive Man would make of Modern Man in a battle for survival. Planes aren’t much better than airports. The flourish required by Modern Man to sit down in his seat on entering the aircraft can only be compared with the flourish he requires when exiting a cimema. This I have noticed is an exceptionally unwieldy performance. He comes out to a fanfare of trumpets as if to say I have seen this film and you in the queue to see it have not. Give me space to exhibit the peacock feathers of my temporal priority. This, by the way is just one of the reasons I rarely go to the pictures nowadays. Add to that the unwieldiness of popcorn buckets and you will understand my position.
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Psychologists sometimes ask you questions about whether you are happy or not. They know it’s a daft question but they think that even though they don’t define happy and everybody has a different version of what it is to be happy and different expectations about how happy you need to be to be happy abound, if you think you are happy, then that tells them something useful. Of course, everyone is selling happiness. Macdonalds; One Direction; Red Nose Day. What might be happening, of course, is that we smuggle other stuff through with it, as in the case of Macdonalds, which smuggles through exploitation, commercial values, the triumph of the big corporation, obesity, hypocrisy. Sometimes what also comes through along with the happiness is other stuff too. The feeling you get when your shoulders sink. And it might be that over time your shoulders start to sink whenever you hear that word.
Spirituality is another one of those words where my shoulders sink. What does it tell you when a person tells you they are interested in spirituality? It means they think they’re better than you because you aren’t saying you’re spiritual. It means perhaps they have a pretty dim view of human activity that doesn’t label itself as spiritual. Somebody told me they were interested in the spiritual quest today. Spiritual people use the word quest a lot. I think I just look for stuff. Anyway, I just nodded and went off to another corner of the room where there was less spirituality going on. I hope my shoulders didn’t sink too much.
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Today is the day for burying Richard III or Richard Crookback as Shakespeare called him in Henry VI part 3 which (little piece of useful information) is where a lot of the good Richard III quotes come from. Of course, nowadays he’s not crookback but a-minor-spinal-deformation-which-may-not-have-been-visible-when-he-had-his-armour-on-back. I vowed not to follow it but you turn the radio on and it’s there. Two women from Northern Ireland in full medieval garb who are quote big Richard fans unquote. The reporter didn’t ask whether they preferred his early work or his late stuff. The second album can often be a disappointment. Maybe they liked his back catalogue. It also turns out that Peter Snow from Richard III Part one is related to Richard III. No wonder he was so excited.
The big news today is that Benedict Cumberbatch (or is it Dominic) is coming to the funeral. You can’t keep him away from anything these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got Clare Balding too. And Sir Hoy to keep the Scots interested. And Stephen Fry. He could hand out the Richard III gongs. And the prize for the best sneaky aside goes to… And then Jeremy Clarkson might try and muscle in with the Henry Bolingbroke heavies.
By the way, turns out Benedict Cumberbatch is also related to Richard III. He would be. And in any case he’s going to play Richard III on stage soon, so he’s going there for research purposes. I bet he puts the trip to Leicester down as tax deductible and all. These celebrities. Wouldn’t have happened in Richard’s day. He’d have had you in the Tower for so much as a dodgy business lunch recipt. Or would he? The debate about Richard continues to rage. This is Peter Snow live from Leicester Cathedral.
PS: I wonder if I’m related to Richard III.
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They are putting Richard III to rest this week. It’s been a long time for him to wait since 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. I just switched on the telly as it was going dark this afternoon and here on Channel 4 is a four hour programme given over to the preparations (preparations, mind) for the funeral on Thursday. As I switch on there is a man in full War of the Roses armour on the comfy sofa with Peter Snow of Channel 4. The man in the armour has an American accent when he speaks. We see pictures of the coffin of Richard III driving through Leicester. People are throwing flowers onto it as it passes and weeping as if it were Lady Di. There is a young reporter interviewing people in the market square. A couple have come all the way from Brazil. The man’s wife has a ring with a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III engraved on it. That’s incredible, says the young reporter. I mean, Brazil wasn’t even discovered when Richard III was around. Oops! That’s a gaffe. You can’t talk about discovering countries anymore, darling. Where do they get these reporters from? Next there are other people on the sofa. Thee is a man from Canada who is a direct descendant of Richard III and a woman from Australia who is also direct descendant of Richard III. Thet’s incredible, says Peter Snow. You’re from Canada and you’re from Australia. The man and the woman don’t look too astounded by the news. Peter Snow tries to explain. I mean, he says, what does that tell us about how we live today? This is surely an interesting philosophical question, but no-one seems to want to run with it. Next we are interviewing the head of the Catholic church in England. He is doing the ceremony today, which concerns the arrival of the body in Leicester Cathedral but the big funeral gig is being given to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Anglican) on Thursday. The Catholic head points out that Richard III had been a Catholic, necessarily, as there were no Anglicans in those days. This is a good point and one up for the Catholics. There is more stuff. Family trees. Was Richard a goodie or a baddie? And so on and on. I think I’ve had enough. I’ll have a cup of tea. What does that tell you about how I live today, Peter Snow?

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On the telly science is big. Especially stuff about the universe. If there’s a big bang or a black hole or some dark matter, the ratings go loopy. What’s more, the graphics people have fun. Metallic greens; burnt tungsten oranges; mercury reds; seventh dimension blues. And all kinds of evocations of the resonance of absence, the singularity of the singularity, the seep of dark matter. We’re listening to Xenakis, Nono, Ligeti on the sound track. Contemporary classical music has never been so popular. Sometimes I try and listen to what the professors in their zany offices are saying. We follow them on their bike ride into MIT or peer at them from behind stacks of papers. They are so loveable with their messy hair and dusty glamour. It’s nice to know someone is doing this stuff. And they don’t care about the money. Probably have dollar bills under their pillows and no proper bank account. But the problem when you watch these programmes is that they tell you nothing. The profs say things like. Dark matter is everything that isn’t there. It’s as if you spilt a load of oil all over your new suit and then put on glasses that don’t register oil. This isn’t useful. But it’s the only way they talk. If they’re from California the metaphor normally concerns Apple or Google or Macdonalds as if big corporations  were the only way we have of relating to the world. Imagine you’re CEO for Google and one day you get the wrong elevator and come out in a world where you’re picking up garbage. That’s a black hole. Oh dear. I suppose I’ll never know much about science. At school the science teacher spent a double period trying to set up an experiment with just one nerdy boy taking an interest and the rest of us throwing acid at each other. There must be reasons why they won’t tell me what dark matter is properly. Probably to do with algebra, which doesn’t make for great telly. Still, at least I get to hear some Ligeti on the mainstream networks.

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They are building the Northern Line tube extension right under my flat. I saw the plans last year and the line that connected Kennington to the new Nine Elms station west of Vauxhall went right under my corner of my building and, to add insult to injury, I live on the ground floor. The construction work has now started as all roads are dug up and signs appear hosting a raft of apologies for this and that. We apologise that you will be wading through mud for the next three years etc and etc, but don’t worry because lots of executive flats are going up and somebody’s making a lot of money out of it. That kind of thing. I have nightmares about how I’ll cope when the escalator emerges in my bathroom. How will I greet the queues of oyster card users without a ticket office? And what of signage? Will it be a case of mind the gap between my telly and that nest of tables from Argos or do I need to introduce a yellow line to keep the public at bay? I don’t want irate customers disgorging into my living room during Match of the Day. I see that at London Bridge station the chaos of the on-going works and the demands of a minister that the crisis be sorted out was countered by Transport for London with the response that staff will from now on be equipped with i-pads. Now they’ll be able to watch You Tube while coralling the public into the right pens. Nobody has learnt the lessons fom fifteen years ago when the government of the day looked to solve the education crisis in schools with the bulk ordering of computers for pupils with the result that now students can plagirize at will and teachers can tell students to get on with so-called research while they sit down and have another biscuit.

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There is a fragment from Kafka’s diaries that has been made into a short parable for collections of Kafka short narratives. It concerns metaphors. It says that a man spent hours every day observing the spinning of a children’s top, believing that if he could understand this one motion he would understand so much more about life. This is an idea that I too have a fondness for. If you are able to tell one story in, say, a foreign language, then you are able to tell any story. The differences between stories are just detail. Everything we do is a cypher for everything else we do. I remember my history teacher when I was twelve saying that the way we organsied our essay showed how we orgnised our life. I wonder. The alternative view is that people with an untidy desk or an untidy flat do their organising in their head in a more creative way than those who keep everything neat. I have an idea that achild sharing space with a sibling, a room or a bed, will be forced to find mental space in a more creative way than a child with a bedroom to him or herself. Which brings me to paper-clips (trombone being the cute word for them in French and German). I fear that in offices up and down the land paper-clips are losing their age-old battle against staples. Staples fix. With staples there can be no mistake. But with paper-clips you can change your mind, stay open to rearrangement. They are also more elegant, less totalitarian, accept the agency of randomness. Paper-clips give me a moment of pleasure; staples an instant of irritation. To what extent does the affiliation with paper-clip or staples say something about us as people? Kafka’s spinning top man would surely find a deep metaphor for life in the choice. It may of course be that it is only that the paper-clip man likes to see himself as a paper-clip man. It may be that deeply he is a staple man. In the same way as people often try to work in fields to which they are least suited because they aspire to do what they find difficult (look at psychoanalysts or nutritionists, almost invariably the least appropriate to their particular field). So I could well be a staple-man who aspires to the condition of a paper-clip man. And, when I think about it, I do have some staple man instincts, but please let us not linger on such things.

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Men like to boast. It is a disagreeable experience to witness. Probably, younger men boast more than older men. It is linked to their libido. In front of women it is like showing your peacock feathers, though at least a peacock shows its own feathers. Women, I sometimes think, quite like men’s boasting. Either, it is proof of men’s energy and virility or it means that  women can feel quietly superior. Women boast less, or they do what is termed a humble brag, which is a form of boasting accompanied by a charitable act to offset it, as in I don’t feel special just because I gave £100 to that charity. I dare say I too can be boastful, although my technique is to turn the whole achievement I am boasting about to derision. That way I have a get-out. It’s an ironic boast, but still valid all the same. I had a friend at school whom we all used to call Stan although his real name was Michael Keane.His were tall tales and we just humoured him as he explained how he had beaten up some men in a street in Manchester city centre. Sometimes you need to blow your own trumpet, although it is invariably ugly. It’s a case of choosing ugliness to get on. The enigmatic modest approach is certainly more attractive but probably less efficient.

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It turns out that less than 1% of the population are allergic to gluten, whereas whole swathes of middle-class Britain are shopping in the ever increasing gluten-free departments of the supermarkets. My suspicion is that it is the word gluten that puts them off. It sounds too much like glutinous and glutton. It is too ugly a word to be marketable. A bit like pilchards which bit the dust some time ago. No right minded aspirational family was going to continue buying something called a pilchard, though it might fork out for a wild sardine or whatever it was they ended up changing its name to. This is also part of a phenomenon that John Carey proposed in his book on The Intellectuals and the Masses. His thesis was that at the end of the nineteenth century once people had learnt how to read and write, the upper middle class intellectuals had to push further out by creating modernism, difficult art, difficult writing, so that they could remain ahead of the crowd. I’m not sure I totally subscribe to this, but you can never overestimate snobbery as a motivating force in cultural life. And so it is with gluten-free. The middle classes will always push out further to put distance between itself and the masses. Remember pashmina when it came out. Very fancy and very pricey. Now you can get three pashmina scarves for a tenner on any street market.

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